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Things to do this week in NYC Jan 16-Jan 23: Museums

Some of the world's most impressive museums and exhibits are in New York?including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and (of course) the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the great things to do in NYC is to visit these spectacular collections. Whether you're a native New Yorker or here on vacation, NYC's museums have something new and interesting to offer everybody! Here is a list of what's going on this week at museums throughout New York City.

Living National Treasure Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984) used stencil-dyeing techniques to create irresistible works of art that range from screens and kimonos to book covers and magazine designs. The combination of Serizawa's originality and vitality with the natural beauty of his materials -- cotton, silk, hemp, and other fibers decorated with the brilliant yet warm hues of natural dyes -- will make this show an unmissable visual feast.

This exhibition includes 124 watercolors selected from a set of 350 that depict detailed scenes from the New Testament, from before the birth of Jesus through the Resurrection, in a chronological narrative. It marks the first time in more than twenty years that any of the Tissot watercolors, a pivotal acquisition that entered the collection in 1900, have been on view at the Brooklyn Museum.

This exhibition presents tales artists told between the American Revolution and World War I about their times and examines how their accounts reflect shifting professional standards, opportunities for study, foreign prototypes, venues for display, and viewers' expectations. Artists include John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows.

This exhibition brings together recent projects by New York City artist Tobi Kahn (chief among them Congregation Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun; Milwaukee, WI, 2008) within the context of sacred spaces conceived for the 21st century.

For more than thirty years, Roni Horn (b. 1955) has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, often exploring issues of gender, identity, androgyny, and the complex relationship between object and subject. Because the artist chooses not to privilege any one medium, Horn's art defies easy categorization. Materials – often used with remarkable virtuosity and sensitivity – take on metaphorical qualities and relate key themes with great visual power. Horn's interest in doubling and identity, for example, is central to understanding her approach to the genres of portraiture and landscape. Image-specific photographic portraits and ethereally beautiful abstract cast glass sculpture relay aspects of both. Similarly, Horn's intricately cut and pigmented drawings suggest something of the elemental nature of the earth that relates in turn to how the landscape of Iceland, where Horn has traveled and made work since 1975, has informed her practice.

The Red Book of C.G. Jung marks the first public presentation of what may be considered psychology's most influential unpublished work. Jung's fascination with mandalas -- Tibetan Buddhist representations of the cosmos used to help reach enlightenment -- is evident in these books where mandala structures figure prominently in many sketches and paintings.

The Museum has always been at the forefront of exhibiting and collecting modern art, but equally important to its mission is educating and engaging the public. MoMA has constantly created new programs -- from children's art classes to concerts in the Sculpture Garden -- to supplement and enrich its exhibitions. This installation features photographs and unique documents drawn from the Museum Archives, celebrating MoMA's founding in 1929, as well as the initiation of a range of educational and cultural offerings that together have created a rich eighty-year legacy.

This survey is MoMA's first major exhibition since 1938 on the subject of this famous and influential school of avant-garde art. Founded in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, the Bauhaus brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the age of technology. Aiming to rethink the very form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped our visual world today.

The first major museum exhibition of jewelry from the personal collection of Madeleine Albright, Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection features more than 200 pins, many of which Secretary Albright wore to communicate a message or a mood during her diplomatic tenure. The exhibition examines the collection for its historic significance as well as the expressive power of jewelry and its ability to communicate through a style and language of its own. The exhibition will be presented in the Museum's Tiffany & Co. Gallery, dedicated to the study and presentation of contemporary jewelry from around the world.

The first major museum exhibition on rock and roll to put photographers in the foreground, acknowledging their creative and collaborative role in the history of rock music. From its earliest days, rock and roll was captured in photographs that personalized, and frequently eroticized, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the genre. The photographers were handmaidens to the rock-and-roll revolution, and their images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock has fostered since the1950s. The exhibition is in six sections: rare and revealing images taken behind the scenes; tender snapshots of young musicians at the beginnings of their careers; exhilarating photographs of live performances that display the energy, passion, style, and sex appeal of the band on stage; powerful images of the crowds and fans that are often evocative of historic paintings; portraits revealing the soul and creativity, rather than the surface and celebrity, of the musicians; and conceptual images and album covers highlighting the collaborative efforts between the image makers and the musicians.

One of the most prolific, unorthodox, and controversial figures of post-war, 20th-century architecture, Eero Saarinen, gets his first retrospective. The exhibition includes never-before-seen sketches, drawings, models, furnishings, films, and photographs from a career highlighted by remarkable designs such as the TWA Terminal at JFK, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the CBS corporate headquarters, and Washington, DC's Dulles International Airport.

Zurich-born, New York-based artist Urs Fischer will be the first artist to take over the entire New Museum on the Bowery. For his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum to date, Fischer will transform the New Museum's gallery spaces by creating a mesmerizing environment featuring towering monuments, tangled abstractions, and a labyrinth of mirrors. This exhibition will be the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, but rather an "introspective," as organizing curator Massimiliano Gioni calls it, the show will combine new productions and iconic artworks, allowing for an in-depth look at Fischer's practice. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition will offer viewers the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in Fischer's universe, which is both spectacular and fragile.

Velazquez Rediscovered features a newly identified painting by Velazquez, Portrait of a Man, formerly ascribed to the workshop of Velazquez, and recently reattributed to the master himself following its cleaning and restoration. It will be shown alongside other works from the Museum's superior collection of works by the great Spanish painter.

This exhibition features recent work by Fast, who received the Whitney's 2008 Bucksbaum Award for his widely acclaimed video, The Casting -- the artist's contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Closed Mon. & Tues. $18.

With this exhibition, Neue Galerie New York pays tribute to its co-founder, Serge Sabarsky. A tireless advocate for German and Austrian art, Sabarsky was the driving force behind the creation of the museum. He was also a dedicated collector, who acquired numerous masterworks by the artists he cherished. The exhibition demonstrates the range and quality of the Sabarsky Collection, with its holdings in works by Austrian artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, and German artists Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, among many others.

Although lacquer is used in many Asian cultures, the art of carving lacquer is unique to China. In this technique, multiple layers (as many as 200) are applied onto a substructure in the shape of a box or some other container and individually dried and carved to create lush geometric motifs, lively representations of figures in landscapes, or birds flying among flowers. This exhibition, which celebrates the Met's collection, showcases approximately 50 examples of this art form. It features several newly acquired works, as well as an important recently restored 18th-century screen that is displayed for the first time.

For this exhibition, Pablo Bronstein (b. 1977) will create two new bodies of work addressing the nature of the museum. Several large ink drawings will portray a mythical history of the Metropolitan Museum, imagining the building under construction and giant artworks being transported or installed. Running in parallel, a series of smaller digital images, displayed on tables under glass, will focus on a hypothetical future of the Museum.

The New-York Historical Society holds one of the nation's premiere collections of eighteenth-century American portraits, works that art historian James Thomas Flexner called "the first flowers of our wilderness." This installation provides twenty-first century viewers with ways of understanding these remarkably innovative and engaging paintings, some of the earliest works of American art. The exhibition focuses on 26 eighteenth-century portraits that mark the beginnings of New York's primacy as a cultural center. It also includes a sampling of related objects from other N-YHS collections. It also speaks to the ways that these works have changed over time as a result of aging materials and conservation treatments.

Obscure in his own lifetime, Thomas Chambers found fame in the twentieth century with the discovery of The "Constitution" and the "Guerriere," a rare signed painting of his that unlocked the identity of the artist behind a singularly flamboyant group of mid-nineteenth-century American marine and landscape paintings. Chambers's expressive style and bold decorative sensibility appealed to avant-garde taste, and he was hailed as a spunky native original, "America's first modern." Although almost nothing was known about his life, his work rapidly earned a place in the growing collections and anthologies of American folk art. As more of Chambers's work came to light, a spare life story was constructed from census records, city directories, and a handful of dated paintings that document a career in the United States between 1832 and 1865. Widely recognized but little studied in the last fifty years, the artist receives here the first survey of his work since his modern debut in New York in 1942.

Obscure in his own lifetime, Thomas Chambers found fame in the twentieth century with the discovery of The "Constitution" and the "Guerriere," a rare signed painting of his that unlocked the identity of the artist behind a singularly flamboyant group of mid-nineteenth-century American marine and landscape paintings. Chambers's expressive style and bold decorative sensibility appealed to avant-garde taste, and he was hailed as a spunky native original, "America's first modern." Although almost nothing was known about his life, his work rapidly earned a place in the growing collections and anthologies of American folk art. As more of Chambers's work came to light, a spare life story was constructed from census records, city directories, and a handful of dated paintings that document a career in the United States between 1832 and 1865. Widely recognized but little studied in the last fifty years, the artist receives here the first survey of his work since his modern debut in New York in 1942.

Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks presents the work of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who has spent more than three years recording wild places in New York City's parks. Located in all five boroughs, these escapes to the woodlands, streams, waterfronts, marshes, and beaches are among the city's greatest assets, yet they are hidden in plain sight. These wild areas, which have been left or returned to their natural state through the city's "Forever Wild" initiative, include the craggy highlands of Manhattan, the sea-facing marshes of Brooklyn, the rocky, Maine-like coastline of the Bronx, and the nearly impenetrable forests of Queens and Staten Island. Through his photographs, Meyerowitz transports the viewer into the heart of a lush wilderness, while portraying pockets of nature as an inextricable part of city life today.

This exhibition explores the life, work, and legacy of Jane Austen (1775-1817), regarded as one of the greatest English novelists. Offering a close-up portrait of the iconic British author, whose popularity has surged over the last two decades with numerous motion picture and television adaptations of her work, the show provides tangible intimacy with Austen through the presentation of more than 100 works, including her manuscripts, personal letters, and related materials, many of which the Morgan has not exhibited in over a quarter century.

Explore Leonardo da Vinci's 500 year old inventions from his actual notebooks as they are brought to life in in this world-premiere exhibit. Discover how his visions for an airplane, automobile and bridge would have worked – long before they became the modern world's reality. Plus, uncover the translations and hidden meanings behind the mastermind's paintings, sketches and notebooks through innovative digital technology.

The second porcelain factory in Europe able to make true porcelain in the manner of the Chinese was established in Vienna in 1718. Founded by Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, the small porcelain enterprise developed a highly distinctive style that remained Baroque in inspiration throughout the history of the factory, which was taken over by the State in 1744. Du Paquier produced a range of tablewares, decorative vases, and small-scale sculpture that found great popularity with the Hapsburg court and the Austrian nobility. This exhibition will chart the history of the development of the Du Paquier factory, setting its production within the historic and cultural context of Vienna in the first half of the eighteenth century. The porcelain to be featured will be drawn from both the Metropolitan Museum and the premier private collection of this material.

New York's role as the Union's prime provider of manpower, treasure, media coverage, image-making, and protest, some of it racist -- the 1863 Draft Riots and the robust effort to unseat Lincoln in 1864 -- are traced alongside Lincoln's concurrent growth as a leader, writer, symbol of Union and freedom, and ultimately as national martyr. Through all, from political parades to funeral processions, New York played a surprisingly central role in the Lincoln story -- and Lincoln became a leading player in the life of New York. This exhibition commemorates the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial.

In his search for a new national message during the 1932 presidential primary, FDR gathered around him a number of political, economic and legal scholars. The core of this group were Columbia University professors, who knew and trusted each other, and were willing to take risks and work long unpaid hours, to promote a candidate that they believed could turn around a nation in crisis. This exhibition will focus on the three key members of the Brain Trust, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolph Berle, and two of the New Deal cabinet members with whom they worked to bring about FDR's radical changes, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins. Using contemporary photographs, cartoons, broadsides, articles and newsreels, this exhibition will be supplemented by audio reminisces from the collection of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office.

Memory (2008), a new commissioned Cor-Ten steel sculptural installation by Anish Kapoor made its debut at Deutsche Guggenheim in November 2008. The exhibition, part of the Guggenheim's 50th-anniversary celebrations, presents New York audiences with a site-specific adaption of the work, conceived originally for both exhibition locations.

Visit the Police Museum's newest installation celebrating one of the most famous officers in the history of the NYPD. Lieutenant Petrosino arrived in New York as a young boy in 1872 and grew to become a pioneer in the fight against organized crime until his murder in 1909 in Sicily. He remains the only New York City Police Officer to be killed in the line of duty while overseas. The original photographs, documents and artifacts within this collection, loaned by Lieutenant Petrosino's family, have waited 100 years to make their first-ever public debut.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife takes the pulse of the international art world's renewed interest in paper as a creative medium and source of artistic inspiration, examining the remarkably diverse use of paper in a range of art forms. Slash is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series, which examines the renaissance of traditional handcraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Design USA celebrates the accomplishments of the winners honored during the first ten years of the prestigious National Design Awards. The exhibition features outstanding contemporary achievements in American architecture, landscape design, interior design, product design, communication design, corporate design, interaction design, and fashion. Developed in collaboration with the renowned firm 2x4, Design USA focuses on innovation through the lens of technology, material, method, craft and transformation.

A diverse selection of European and American works on paper spanning the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. A group of early Italian engravings will be shown, including two masterpieces attributed to the great Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506): Bacchanal with Silenus (ca. 1475) and Risen Christ between Saints Andrew and Longinus (ca. 1472). A section is also devoted to Italian painters from the seventeenth century who experimented with the medium of etching in new and exciting ways. Highlights include Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's (1609-1664) atmospheric portrayal of the ancient philosopher Diogenes on his quest for an honest man (Diogenes with the Lantern, ca. 1645-1647) and Jason and the Dragon (ca. 1664), one of the last and most dramatic etchings by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673).

The Museum of Modern Art presents an installation that will, for the first time since the Museum's reopening in 2004, feature the full group of Claude Monet's late paintings in the collection. These include a mural-sized triptych (Water Lilies, 1914–26) and a single-panel painting of the water lilies in the Japanese-style pond that Monet cultivated on his property in Giverny, France (Water Lilies, 1914–26), as well as The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22) and Agapanthus (1914–26), depicting the majestic plants in the pond's vicinity. These paintings have long held a special status with the Museum's audiences and, much like MoMA's Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, they provide a modern oasis in the center of midtown Manhattan. These works will be complemented by two loans of closely related paintings.

This exhibition is the first ever dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572), presenting nearly all the known drawings by, or attributed to, the leading Italian Mannerist artist, who was active primarily in Florence. A painter, draftsman, academician, and enormously witty poet, Bronzino became famous as the court artist to the Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and his beautiful wife, the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo. This monographic exhibition will contain approximately 60 drawings from European and North-American collections, many of which have never before been on public view.

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton's career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects.

Photographs are often perceived as transparent windows onto a three-dimensional world. Yet photographs also have their own material presence as physical objects. Contemporary artists who exploit this apparent contradiction between photograph as window and photograph as object are featured in Surface Tension. This exhibition presents 30 works that play with the inherent tension between the flatness of the photograph and the often lifelike illusion of depth. Surface Tension highlights the ways in which artists use photographic and multi-media techniques to direct our attention to the physical surface of the photograph. Among the works featured are photographs that have been purposely scratched, burned, or painted on, as well as photograms made by placing objects directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the permanent collection and features several recent acquisitions and other contemporary photographs never before shown at the Museum.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the so-called New Typography movement brought graphics and information design to the forefront of the artistic avant-garde in Central Europe. Rejecting traditional arrangement of type in symmetrical columns, modernist designers organized the printed page or poster as a blank field in which blocks of type and illustration (frequently photomontage) could be arranged in harmonious, strikingly asymmetrical compositions. Taking his lead from currents in Soviet Russia and at the Weimar Bauhaus, the designer Jan Tschichold codified the movement with accessible guidelines in his landmark book Die Neue Typographie (1928). Almost overnight, typographers and printers adapted this way of working for a huge range of printed matter, from business cards and brochures to magazines, books, and advertisements. This installation of posters and numerous small-scale works is drawn from MoMA's rich collection of Soviet Russian, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian graphics. They represent material from Tschichold's own collection, which supported his teaching and publication from around 1927 to 1937.

This intriguing exhibition brings to life one of the greatest trading routes in human history, showcasing the goods, cultures, and technologies from four representative cities: Xi'an, China's Tang Dynasty capital; Turfan, a verdant oasis and trading outpost; Samarkand, home of prosperous merchants who thrived on the caravan trade; and Baghdad, a fertile hub of commerce and scholarship that became the intellectual center of the era.

It is commonly assumed that contemporary self-taught artists work solely in a representational style, eager to engage in storytelling and personal memory. But while the narrative tradition often is a primary impulse, a significant number exhibit a tendency to be seduced by material, technique, color, form, line, and texture, creating artwork that omits or obscures representation. "Approaching Abstraction" highlights the work of more than forty of these artists and includes European art brut masters, such as Aloise Corbaz, Rafael Lonne, and Adolf Wolfli; self-taught artists from the American South, such as Thornton Dial Sr., Bessie Harvey, J.B. Murry, and Purvis Young; and lesser-known artists, such as Johnny Culver, Hiroyuki Doi, and Melvin Way. This first exploration into nonobjective expression within this field is selected entirely from the museum's permanent collection.

This exhibition -- the first in an art museum to be devoted exclusively to Oceanic musical instruments -- explores the rich diversity of musical instruments created and used in the Pacific Islands. Drawn primarily from the Met's collections, the exhibition features more than 60 instruments from small personal types such as panpipes and courting whistles to larger forms played at performances heard by the entire community, such as the exquisitely carved temple drums of the Austral Islands or the imposing sacred slit gongs of New Guinea.

Henry Darger (1892-1973) adopted countless images from popular-media sources, such as newspapers, magazines, comics, and cartoons, but no single source influenced him as steadily as the coloring book. This intimate exhibition features nine examples culled from the museum's extensive Henry Darger Study Archive, illustrating the primary role the coloring book played for this important twentieth-century artist.

Body Parts features thirty-five objects that represent individual body parts in ancient Egyptian art from the Brooklyn Museum's collection, many of which will be displayed for the first time. While traditional exhibitions of ancient art focus on reconstructing damaged works, this exhibition uses fragmentary objects to illuminate the very realistic depiction of individual body parts in canonical Egyptian sculpture. The ancient Egyptians carefully depicted each part of the human body, respecting the significance of every detail. When viewed individually these sculptures and fragments reveal ancient notions of the body, as well as details of workmanship, frequently unnoticed in more complete sculptures.

A Song for the Horse Nation presents the epic story of the horse's influence on American Indian tribes from the 1600s to the present. Drawing upon a treasure-trove of stunning historical objects -- including ledger drawings, hoof ornaments, beaded bags, hide robes, paintings, and other objects -- and new pieces by contemporary Native artists, the exhibition reveals how horses shaped the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual foundations of American Indian life, particularly on the Great Plains.